The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

Trying to contact a Walmart customer service representative in a live chat is apparently an exercise only to be undertaken by the fleetest of fingers, the tersest of typists. Because as Consumerist reader Jasmina points out, it’s only available for one minute every week.

At the time of this writing, the link to open the live chat shows the hours for service, or should we say, minute for service? As seen above, it’s only open on Fridays from 1:00 a.m. to 1:01 a.m.

It’s worth noting one very important thing here: If you try to find live chat on the Walmart.com Help page, there’s no link sending users directly to it. I had to Google it to find it, which could indicate that Walmart discontinued the app and just hasn’t taken its landing page down. Which still makes for a pretty funny situation, eh?

After all — customers who used Live Chat in the past might not see it on the page but figure maybe they’re just missing something, then go ahead and Google it anyway, only to come upon the one-minute window results.

We’ve reached out to Walmart for comment to see if that is indeed the case, or if it’s really true that the live chat gates only open for a scant 60 seconds every Friday at 1:00 a.m. before slamming shut again at 1:01 a.m.